


Ghost in the Machine

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Great Hiatus, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 04:59:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For full optimisation, you have to purge a hard drive of anything unnecessary - such as John Watson.</p><p>This is the theory. The reality is rather different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost in the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> For the sherlockmas prompt: _Sherlock/John; Sherlock has never had any trouble repressing thoughts which were distracting him before, but after his 'death' he finds that thoughts of John are not so easily repressed - when he shuts them out of his days they appear in increasingly vivid detail in his dreams._
> 
> Originally published on LiveJournal 28th February 2012.

_Delete._

The hard drive works best when all it contains is that which is useful. Any new data slows it down and defeats its purpose.

Delete.

Therefore anything which is not useful – anything which is not _relevant_ – must be removed. For a new purpose, the system must be purged.

_Delete._

The solar system is not useful. His parents’ deaths are not useful. As he’s amply demonstrated, astronomy can be learnt, and grief, well, what is necessary, what is _helpful_ in that? After all, it’s not knowing; it’s feeling. In order to act in the most logical – and best – fashion possible, feeling must be deleted. Irene Adler was the best proof for which Sherlock could have asked.

If he’s to survive, if he wants to fall and not hit – already too illogical, but there are external factors, he tells himself over and over – then feeling has to stop. 

Which is why he needs to delete John Watson from his hard drive.

Not in entirety. He’s too intrinsic to this situation, to the chain of events and motivation, and besides which, his brother won’t stop texting him details, even when Sherlock asks him not to. Mycroft only stops – if _stops_ is accurate – when Sherlock wipes his phone, disassembles it, and drops a different part in a different river for a month.

The feelings, though. John is directly connected to why Sherlock is on the run in the first place. It is a warning; besides which, feelings _hurt_. Sherlock doesn’t need to hurt, he needs to survive. So he cannot think of John Watson. Logical. His mind is a hard drive, and anything can be deleted. 

He thinks – as he goes through his mind palace, checking behind the columns and underneath the sofas – that really he could just not go back. Nothing really to tie him to that old life, once the deletion begins. It’s not as if his brother cannot find him if necessary.

Really, it’s remarkable how John has managed to infiltrate his mind. It takes so long, longer than he could have imagined, before Sherlock mentally declares the process complete.

Victor Trevor all over again: presumably significant at some unlogged point, but now only recalled through conscious effort. This is easy. Sherlock and John lived together for under a year and a half; Sherlock Holmes is thirty-five years old, even without adding the additional months. Mathematically and proportionally speaking, John Watson’s place in his life is hardly of note. Surely out of thirty-three years Sherlock can find something else to think of. Even if not, remember there is still Moriarty: a web to shred, a plan to unravel, a game to win.

So Sherlock presses _delete_ , and that is the end of it.

*********

Except – as every decent hacker knows – almost all data leaves traces. Echoes, if you wish to be poetic about binary.

Sherlock lies on a bed in Berlin, staring up at the ceiling, and tries to ignore the dream of domesticity. Because surely he can dream better than that?

He doesn’t try to sleep again that night. He passes the hours before sunset trying to find what he missed. He takes a mental disinfectant to the most infected areas; scrubs and scrubs away at Baker Street.

It occurs to him that the metaphor is going too far.

But without metaphor, he has no way of shaping his thoughts into anything he can control.

The hard drive is only a metaphor.

**********

Sherlock Holmes has never been a lucid dreamer.

More than anything at this moment, gripping Romanian sheets, he wishes that he was.

For as long as he can remember, that has been the one thing that has eluded him. The one aspect of control his mind escapes. He cannot control his dreams.

However, he thinks irritably, pushing mental furniture to one side, wondering how John could have burrowed so deep, he’s like an _infestation_ (no, not an infestation, John is not a pest, but he is, what is _wrong_ with him?), it _should_ be possible to…influence one’s dreams. All they are is the mind sorting through data. Removing the data should remove the ability for the mind to consider it.

He thinks of ghosts, and snarls in frustration.

**********

Moscow. John wanted to see Red Square.

How does Sherlock know this?

Because he bloody well _dreamt_ it.

**********

Sherlock breaks his conscious rule and, just this one, _allows_ himself to think about John. (Perhaps then the thoughts might obey him, the way they already _should_.) Specifically, about the nights when the desert came back for him, and Sherlock just sat in their living room, trying not to listen to the tell-tale creaks, counting down to the awakening, and wondering whether it will be with a gasp or a yell.

His fingers twitch for his Stradivarius, learned instinct revived by memory. Potent.

It could be worse, he reminds himself. There are so many things he could dream of.

Death.

Moriarty.

The Fall.

John, at least, hasn’t been twisted into a murderer, or a corpse. He is just John. And that should be enough.

**********

Sherlock is aware that he is not an easy person to deal with. In any setting.

Awareness, however, is not the same as _experience_ , and he has apparently found himself in the unenviable position of having that slice of insight into other people thanks to his own mind. For the first time, Sherlock might begin to appreciate what it is like to be thoroughly outmanoeuvred by his own brain. In many ways, he should have seen it coming: who else would be capable of it?

( _You’re me._ ) (Shut up shut up shut up)

All might be well and good, as other people say, if not for the fact that increasingly, as if becoming as bored as him (or knowing how quickly Sherlock can reach that state), his dreams have started developing, dancing, _fantasising_ ; improvisations on a theme.

These things never happened.

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson shared a flat; they solved cases together; they ran together. While, being England, some of that running was in the rain, they never simply stood, far too close, and let the weather thunder around them; they never so much as shared a bed, let alone lay in it for hours, a day, slow and sunshine-filled; they certainly never kissed.

The first time that last point features, Sherlock considers never sleeping again. Surely he doesn’t need anything that makes him think about…that.

**********

The drugs might have been a mistake.

He just wanted to get away; to throw his mind open. Perhaps he might have gained some insight, some comprehension, some _peace_ by letting it have its fun, just for now, before wrestling it back into cold calculation.

The drugs were definitely a mistake.

It’s on the drugs – just one night, never again, should never have slipped (can’t find the line without John) – that the kissing goes…further.

Sherlock is mildly disgusted when he awakens the next day, while he showers, as he fights to regain the man he was. It was so banal it hardly bears thinking about. So boring that for once it seems easy enough to simply press _delete_ and consult the map of Asia, tracing an imaginary line (rather than a face) (shut up).

Once again, _delete_ lacks the finality he needs.

While crossing the border, he smashes the keyboard, and wonders what that’s supposed to represent.

**********

He doesn’t think.

Sherlock is always thinking.

He doesn’t think about John; imposes restrictions, limitations, rules and regulations. His hard drive answers to him and him alone, and never the other way around. Sherlock is in control.

( _God yes John please_ )

He is perfectly capable of maintaining order in his own mind.

( _John I want I need_ )

He is not going to be beaten, in any way, by anyone, and that includes himself.

( _Miss you so much_ )

There’s possibly a contradiction there, the idea that if his mind is himself, then who is supposed to win, and he actually lets himself seriously consider that as he makes his way through China, across the ocean to Japan. If he’s analysing that, then he isn’t analysing…something else.

He can’t think of what it is, because then he’s lost. 

**********

John Watson is a virus, he concludes in Sydney, as he fights with a slow PC in an internet café.

If he ever needed the confirmation, the fact that he thought the name will stand.

He glares at the screen, angry at himself (can’t be angry at John), angry at technology, angry at everything (else).

But that’s it. That’s the word he’s been searching for, and it fits. John is everywhere in his mind, infiltrating every last inch, burrowed down deep, so deep that he’s in the bits that Sherlock doesn’t think he can even control (at least, not anymore). Two ways to deal with such a problem: abandon the device, or reboot it.

His hand hovers over the mental button. Could he do it? Reboot the whole thing? 

He couldn’t.

For all that he wishes it was, his mind is not the same as this computer that has just deigned to load the top of the page and then freeze – which is just as well. 

He is simply trapped here with – someone. (No need to admit defeat entirely.)

(It’s not the most terrible fate he could have imagined.)

**********

As he picks apart Los Angeles, he ponders fantasy and reality. The line is rather thin here, after all. The line is thin everywhere, for him. 

(Maybe he’s getting better, maybe he’s getting worse, but amongst his dreams he tries to convince John he was a fake, a lie, a fairytale – if only to hear John say again and again, purely, simply, _brilliantly_ , that he believes in him.)

Somebody recognises him, and he feels something that some (John) might call his heart skipping a beat. They change their mind though, insist he simply resembles ‘this dead guy’ online, say of course he can’t be him. Of course: Sherlock Holmes would not be found wandering the backstreets of LA in a raggedy hoodie and several days of beard growth. One of the advantages of such a distinctive appearance (or however John put it, he can’t linger there) has been how misleading altering it can be. 

Who is Sherlock Holmes?

Better to think about that than who somebody else is – or what he wants them to be.

**********

New York. Last stop before England again; before (bite the lip, furrow brow in concentration, doing so well the last few weeks) _London_.

The papers inform him it has been almost three years. He hadn’t realised. Time has stopped meaning anything. (Possibly caused by irregular sleeping patterns, but those aren’t new; lack of routine or someone to remind him of the world.)

Three years. That means his thirty-eighth birthday was…recently. Almost the third anniversary of his Fall. He wonders if they’ll remember. 

(The dreams ask whether John is alone, whether he is waiting, and torture him with every scenario his mind can devise. Over the following days and nights they ask what would be better.)

***********

On the plane from JFK, his eyes slide shut.

What does he want?

Does he want John to be there? To be happy? Angry? Quiet?

What does he want to do?

Getting too close to the reality, the dreams refuse to offer him any help. He’s mildly alarmed to discover he even wanted that from them.

**********

The very worst part? 

They don’t even stop when John is back in his life; when he doesn’t have to control his thoughts any more. Except he does, because somehow over the three years something changed enough that John has become the most distracting feature Sherlock has ever encountered, almost as if one of the many tracks in his mind is now nothing but monitoring everything about the man. While Sherlock had hardly been indifferent to him before, this is ridiculous.

What is possibly even more ridiculous – at this point everything has reached the extreme where it’s almost impossible to distinguish variation – is how…disappointed he was at the anticlimactic reunion. Certainly John had looked dumbfounded (natural), angry (to be expected), as if he might lose consciousness (slight overreaction, surely?) but he hadn’t, oh, thrown himself at Sherlock as if they were the last men on the planet, or something equally nonsensical. And Sherlock hadn’t expected that, or rather _shouldn’t_ have expected that, but his reaction – he doesn’t tell John his alarm was due to realising how lost he is, to the point where he could actually be _disappointed_ by that – had suggested something else.

Dreams do not become reality. This is a fact. This is just one of many facts on which Sherlock has built his entire life.

He thinks of John upstairs, and thinks he might be going insane.

Again.

**********

In hindsight, the resolution is inevitable. 

John can tell something is wrong, so he doesn’t leave Sherlock alone. Neither does Sherlock’s mind – not his hard drive, because that metaphor died a long time ago. Between the two of them, it is mildly more difficult to think than usual, particularly given that with John _right there_ and _not going away_ and a thousand other brilliant things, the dreams are more vivid than ever. Being able to think about him, consciously and freely, while waking means they have more space for invention.

Sherlock doesn’t even realise he’s kissing him until he feels John go still under him. For a moment, he actually doesn’t think _anything_. It’s surprising, terrifying, and oddly thrilling. Naturally it doesn’t last, but that as much as the shock at what he’s done is why he finds himself staring.

Dreams don’t cover this. Don’t cover reality; don’t cover the fact they might have got it wrong. His mind certainly never gave John that inscrutable expression, considering, curious, surprised, so much all together (doesn’t that _hurt_?), and it serves as ample distraction to think smugly that really, in the end _John_ won, because he defied all expectations yet again. 

John is smiling. Irrationally Sherlock briefly wonders whether he can hear his thoughts, know that he’s won – 

John kisses him.

Sherlock stops thinking.

**********

“You’re a virus,” he murmurs against John’s neck.

John, because he is _fantastic_ , just chuckles. 

“Go to sleep, Sherlock.”


End file.
